USA, OR: Sasquatch Brewery to expand this summer into huge new brewing facility

Sasquatch Brewery will expand this summer into a huge new 4,000 square foot brewing and cidermaking facility in the Northwest Industrial District in Portland, Willamette Week reported on May 3.

But no worries, the current wildly popular brewpub will stay put.

Sasquatch has been operating at the edge of its brewing capacity for quite some time already, says manager Alex Beard. "We have plateaued in terms of what we can do," Beard says, "unless we were doing shifts and making multiple brews a day, we'd hit what we were capable of. We want to have room for barrels, room to do some fun stuff."

Their current brewing space is only about 300 square feet, leaving no chance they could expand beyond their current four 7-barrel fermenters. Their 15-bvarrel tank already has to be stored on the back deck.

The new facility 2532 NW 30th Avenue—a stone's throw from the giant Portland Brewing facility—will add not only another 15-barrel brewery and plenty of storage space, but also a 90-barrel cider fermenter, making it one of the largest cideries in town.

They also plan to open a taproom in their Northwest production facility.

In part, says Bergen, the added capacity will let Sasquatch finish some projects they've been working on for a while now—most importantly, bottling. They'll focus first on bottling their New West Cider, which the brewery began making in 2015.

Sasquatch is still in the permitting phase, but they hope to have their Northwest brewery and taproom up and running by the end of the summer.

They plan to turn the Northwest space into their main production brewery, while reserving the original brewspace in Hillsdale as a pilot and experimental brewery for seasonals and fun brewing projects. Many of the taps at the original brewpub will be filled with beer made at their Northwest Portland brewery.

05 May, 2016